Computer outage stalls Massachusetts driver licensing

Computers for issuing driver's licenses and vehicle registrations throughout Massachusetts were offline for nearly three hours Friday.

A coding error in the mainframe that runs applications for the state Registry of Motor Vehicles shut down the system, Massachusetts CIO David Lewis said. Technicians at a systems hub in the Boston suburb of Chelsea replaced a part and reloaded the code to restart the system.

'The RMV has one integrated database for all its applications,' Lewis said, 'thus, once a problem occurs, it affects everything.'

RMV spokesman David Shaw said the problem began around 1 p.m.; the system came back online around 3:50 p.m.